Google Local Business Center Upgrade -Unlimited Category Options

With the recent rollout of Add a Place to Map , allowing everyone to add a listing to maps with its more flexible categorization structure, Google has also upgraded the categorization system in the Local Business Center.

The new categorization system still allows only 5 category entries per business. They can however, be from a much larger list of Google provided suggestions or entered in an ad-hoc fashion in any way that the business owner wishes. Under the previous category system there was but one category choicein the insurance area: Services – Insurance (to see a list of all previous categories)

However in the interview with Maslan in February, it was obvious that Google is aware of this possibility:

He felt that over the long haul the best solution was to allow the users to make corrections to the listings and then have some way to make that visible in the ranking. They are definitely pursuing more user input which he hoped would provide an ultimate reduction of the frustration levels. They are also putting in place techniques to prevent abuse. Their general philosophy is that there are more good people than bad but that the bad are very motivated, and that with the right balance of technology they can have high confidence in the data.

I would assume that Google is going to take mapspam quite seriously. I invited someone from the local team to discuss the subject in depth with my entire team just last week, for example, and we talked about lots of ways to work together. So my personal advice would be to make sure that your business name/category is accurate.

Ominous advice for sure. It will be interesting to see how this is policed and managed in the coming months as significantly more data flows into Maps from users and business owners alike.

Please consider leaving a comment as your input will help me (& everyone else) better understand and learn about local.

Is it possible to do a bulk upload of custom categories or do I have to go into every listing I have and manually do them all?
Or is it possible to have one master listing which when changed whill change the bulk of the information for the rest?
Thanks

Hello Mike, like you said increased category flexibility also open new possibilities for spam. For both spammers and ordinary users the increased category feature is useful. Google may watch and take serious actions against those who add massive category options. So while adding many categories you should be careful too.